“The most common thought that people hold [about fat], and I held it too, is that food was responsible for my weight gain. That is a belief that does not serve you, and in my mind now it is complete balderdash! Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight.”

Byrne suggests that if you want to lose weight, you should stop looking at fat people:

“If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it.”
Both from Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (Atria)

Rhoda Byrne’s The Secret once looked like the favorite to win the grand prize in this year’s Delete Key Awards contest. Early in 2007, Jerry Adler had a brilliant five-page evisceration of this self-help book in Newsweek that rightly called some of its claims scientifically “preposterous.” Much of the book is just bizarre: Your thinking about food “has food put on weight”? (Does your thinking demagnetize the scale?) But with its fake red-wax seal and parchmentlike paper, The Secret tips you off right away to the possibility that it’s goop. Some of its rivals made weirder claims but were packaged to look like more than than they were.

Slogging through some of these books is so much more work than it appears, isn’t it?

One reason why I could restrain myself on “The Secret” is that Jerry Adler did a great five-page takedown of the book in Newsweek last March (Google “Adler + Newsweek + the Secret”). That article freed me from feeling I had to be comprehensive. The trouble is: Tolle needs the dissection, too. Thanks so much for your comment.
Jan

I’m working on currently. For now, please take a moment and visit the web site I created because, as a psychotherapist (not to mention reasonable human being), I have talked with many people for whom The Secret is actually dangerous. No exaggeration. Please have a look: http://www.thesecretantidote.com. If you like what you read, please help me to distribute “The Antidote.” You have to pay for The Secret, but “The Antidote” is right there on the web site — FREE. Thanks. Thom Rutledge / http://www.thesecretantidote.com